Nintendo’s WarioWare gets weird with new smartphone app
▼ Summary
– Nintendo launched Pictonico, a mobile game with microgames similar to WarioWare, despite having largely retreated from smartphone gaming.
– Each round consists of 10 quick microgames lasting seconds, where players follow simple commands like “chomp” or “pluck hair.”
– Pictonico uses photos from the user’s camera roll to customize microgames, inserting faces or images into the gameplay.
– Players can choose which photos appear to avoid discomfort, and the game occasionally uses non-face images like travel photos.
– The game is free to download as a demo, with two paid content packs ($7.69 and $5.99) unlocking the full 80-minigame version.
A decade ago, Nintendo made a bold entrance into mobile gaming with a Super Mario platformer directed by Shigeru Miyamoto. That game found an audience, but it didn’t meet the company’s commercial expectations. Since then, Nintendo has quietly stepped back from smartphones, releasing only a few apps and some legacy titles. That’s why this week’s launch of Pictonico felt so unexpected. It’s a quirky, playful mobile game that captures the chaotic spirit of WarioWare, yet I have no idea how it fits into Nintendo’s broader mobile strategy.
Like WarioWare, Pictonico (I’m still unsure how to pronounce it) is a collection of microgames that last just seconds each. Every round throws 10 of these rapid-fire challenges at you, and you barely have time to grasp the objective before moving on. You might get a simple command like “chomp,” then find yourself grabbing a giant mouth and making it chew food. The games are delightfully absurd: you’ll pluck hairs, lick lollipops, and peel bananas at breakneck speed.
The twist is that Pictonico uses photos from your camera roll to personalize the experience. The app pulls faces from your images and inserts them into the microgames. I ended up making my wife chomp down on a kebab with an unsettlingly large mouth, or rubbing a lamp to summon a buff genie version of my 10-year-old. As an example, here is me as a ballerina waiting for a photo:
Image: Nintendo
You can choose which photos appear, so things don’t get too weird, and the game sometimes pulls non-human images. At one point, I had to match a photo broken into three parts, and it turned out to be a shot I took while reporting on the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto. Pictonico is free to download on iOS and Android, but that only unlocks a demo. To access the full experience, which includes 80 different minigames, you need to buy two content packs priced at $7.69 and $5.99 each.
(Source: The Verge)
